This is 64: Mark Ernest Pothier Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire
This is 64: Mark Ernest Pothier Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire
"I’m one of those people who often gets told: 'You have an old soul.'"
From the time I was 10, I’ve been obsessed with what it means to grow older. I’m curious about what it means to others, of all ages, and so I invite them to take “The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.”
Here, author Mark Ernest Pothier responds. -Sari Botton
P.S. A reminder that in my book, everyone who is alive and aging is considered an Oldster, and that every contributor to this magazine is the oldest they have ever been, which is interesting new territory for them—and interesting to me, the 57-year-old who publishes this. Going forward I will delete any comments that dismiss contributors’ experiences of getting older because they’re allegedly not old enough.
Mark Ernest Pothier grew up on a subsistence farm in Northern New York and has lived in San Francisco with his wife, a Bay Area native, since 1987. After winning a Chicago Tribune/Nelson Algren Short Story Award in 1994, he wrote fiction on the side while working in nonprofit communications. His debut novel, Outer Sunset (University of Iowa Press), which has been called "[i]nsightful and bittersweet… a terrific novel" by the San Francisco Chronicle, came out 30 years later, in May 2023.
How old are you?
64. Born in the '50s.
Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? If so, what is it? And why, do you think?
I always project a year ahead of my numerical age, to somehow prepare for its arrival. So we’re thinking 65 now. Medicare!
Do you feel old for your age? Young for your age? Just right? Are you in step with your peers?
I look youngish, but the age I feel is relative. In the midst of immediate, unselfconscious moments — lows and highs — I always feel the same age, and talk in the same voice that I did last crisis. In everyday life, however, it’s the people around me and how they perceive me who most define my age. For example, lecturing a teenager makes you feel old, but pulling the same kid and his skateboard out of the path of an oncoming bus makes you both feel vulnerable and young.
By our natures, and in many ways due to watching our parents, my wife and I have made our big decisions from a long-view—chosing to major in Liberal Arts without any career plan, raising our kids in San Francisco while renting, owning little, and so on—and now we’ve got confirmation that those choices, for us, were worth what we gave up.
What do you like about being your age?
I am so grateful to have answered a few of my bigger questions, and for learning more how to be quiet and sit still. By our natures, and in many ways due to watching our parents, my wife and I have made our big decisions from a long-view—chosing to major in Liberal Arts without any career plan, raising our kids in San Francisco while renting, owning little, and so on—and now we’ve got confirmation that those choices, for us, were worth what we gave up.
For example, 20 years ago when our kids were little, our jobs were in flux, housing was skyrocketing, and we thought we might lose our lease, we nearly moved far away. It was a huge, tough decision: Do you want to buy that big house you can pay cash for in a town where you don’t know anyone and where your kids will stand out? Or should you stay in this city you love and tough it out along with those friends who can stay? I had a job lined up in advance, too, but a call with the guy who’d left it helped us make our final decision: He said that, despite all efforts, he and his family were unable to recreate the community they’d left before he had taken the job, three years prior. Relationships have real value, and even if that value can’t be measured, it definitely accrues with time and proximity. We chose to stay put.
Big decisions like that feel easier now, not just because we’re sure of what most matters to us, but also because we’ve been able to witness how various life choices we (and others around us) have made played out. Also, in your “mature” years, most of your responsibilities to family and friends are not as high-stakes as before. The kids aren’t moist and vulnerable anymore! (Although maybe your parents are, now.)
I’m more inured to trouble; it always passes, and you can sometimes grow from it.
What is difficult about being your age?
There’s a line in a Field Report song I love: “The body remembers what the mind forgets: it archives every heartbreak and cigarette.” Well, folks my age can’t avoid being archivists. Almost weekly I recall how wonderful it used to feel to drop into bed at midnight, in any condition, and wake up perfectly refreshed eight hours later. I can manage my arthritis, but it takes more time each year, and promises to get worse.
It’s difficult to watch the same political and economic waves rise and fall in repeating, cyclical patterns over the years, but I’m also grateful for the new perspective—of seeing patterns. And it’s harder and harder to witness the increasing damage we all do to the web of nature, knowing where we’re headed; when I was younger, it was simply a bummer I could put aside, but now I see it everywhere.
My grandparents had either passed or seriously aged by the time they’d reached 64. In comparison, I can look at my Dad and most of my friends and see how much better aging has become for all of us—how grateful we should be for modern medicine.
What is surprising about being your age, or different from what you expected, based on what you were told?
To have made it this far in decent shape is a gift.
There are so many pitfalls you can’t fully see when you’re young, and even if you dodge those—quit smoking before it reshapes your body, save a little money before it’s too late for it to grow—you’ll never know how dangerous some of those were, and how liberating those wins will feel, until you’re on the other side of the minefield.
My grandparents had either passed or seriously aged by the time they’d reached 64. In comparison, I can look at my Dad and most of my friends and see how much better aging has become for all of us—how grateful we should be for modern medicine.
What has aging given you? Taken away from you?
I was an easy baby but so grumpy-faced my folks nicknamed me “The Sitch.” (I’m not sure why, and never thought much of it until three different people stopped my wife and I to note that our son, snoozing in his stroller, looked like Charles Laughton.) I’m one of those people who often gets told: You have an old soul. Whatever the truth, I feel that aging is making that heaviness lift a little each year. (I may be getting simpler.)
I grew into a very tightly wound kid, but now I get to enjoy the remains of that excess energy. Aging is giving me a confidence and calm I never even knew to look for. It’s brought me friendships and a marriage that have lasted decades; my everyday life is full of people I can’t imagine seeing the world without. And getting to know your kids as adults is a real kick, too.
However, I’ve also lost my mother, my only sister, and way too many of friends over those same years. That will not get better.
How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?
Even if you don’t go at it intentionally, you shape yourself by every decision you make: What you read, your work, who you love, the people you chose to be around and where and how you make a home. With each choice you’re gaining something while putting something else aside — sometimes irretrievably.
My sense of myself took a monster hit when I was 15, in 1974, when my folks decided to “get back to the earth.” Up till then, we’d lived in a modern home they’d built, in the same small Massachusetts town with the same friends in a great school my entire life, a place I loved, joining everything and knowing everyone. My folks were radically all-in about every choice they faced, however, and in one month that summer after my first year in high school they sold everything, moved the five of us (and three cats) into a truck-top camper, and we hit the interstate to search America for The Perfect Little Farm before the school year began.
That’s a long story for later, but: In one brief summer I went from the student-council honor-roll class clown to an inverted teen who shat in an outhouse, washed in the barn, reeked of woodsmoke, and fought over a one-bulb outlet with his little brother and sister. We lived ten miles away from our new town in New York’s North Country, where the winter comes dark and heavy in October and lasts till May. Fifteen is a rough age to feel so alone and powerless, and it’s one reason my wife and I committed to never moving our kids after starting middle school. Every choice I’ve made since has been (consciously or no) to counteract that tight interiority I’d felt so trapped in that winter.
Aging is giving me a confidence and calm I never even knew to look for. It’s brought me friendships and a marriage that have lasted decades; my everyday life is full of people I can’t imagine seeing the world without. And getting to know your kids as adults is a real kick, too.
On the other hand, seeing your parents live so intentionally shapes you for the better. I love living in a city, where life can be just as green as in the woods. I like being anonymous in crowds and having broad choices for friends and jobs. The daily proof urban life provides that people can live better together gives me great hope. Of course, solitude and quiet mean a lot too, and perhaps they always did—maybe that’s true for writer types—but being alone in a big library or walking on a sidewalk feels more meaningful to me than living alone in the woods.
What are some age-related milestones you are looking forward to? Or ones you “missed,” and might try to reach later, off-schedule, according to our culture and its expectations?
We may never own our own home. That’s a hard thing to say, for someone who’s such a homebody. On the other hand, if we did own a tree, a porch, a grill, a yard big enough for a dog and the cat to catch moths, I might never leave it.
What has been your favorite age so far, and why? Would you go back to this age if you could?
I don’t reminisce about an age so much as people and key good times. My first year in San Francisco was magical; everything was unexpected and generous and fun. I’d love to meet my wife all over again, hold our babies for the first time, have coffee all morning with my Mom. I’m still anxious around launching my debut novel, but it is a ride not to be missed, so I’m sure I’ll look back on this time fondly, too.
In one brief summer I went from the student-council honor-roll class clown to an inverted teen who shat in an outhouse, washed in the barn, reeked of woodsmoke, and fought over a one-bulb outlet with his little brother and sister…Fifteen is a rough age to feel so alone and powerless, and it’s one reason my wife and I committed to never moving our kids after starting middle school.
Is there someone who is older than you, who makes growing older inspiring to you? Who is your aging idol and why?
Yes! And this is a real surprise, at my age. After 13 years on a waiting list, we finally scored a community garden plot at Fort Mason: There are about 100 small plots in a beautiful, long-standing garden perched above the Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge to the west and Russian Hill rising to the east, green parrots and coyotes and lots of people older than me. Some of these folks have been working their plot for 25 years; they’re all knowledgeable, patient (as gardeners are), and they love to chat, even the cranks. Everyone leaves their filters outside the creaky gate. I’m also lucky to be around older friends in a volunteer chorus, around my friends’ parents, and elsewhere, but this garden crew is a surprising amount of good fun. Most seniors talk fearlessly, with style. And, at this age, we’ve got so much to talk about.
What aging-related adjustments have you recently made, style-wise, beauty-wise, health-wise?
It’s a hidden blessing that the changes you need to make for health reasons bring a new pleasure of their own. For example: Everything I do for my neck and back pain makes me more limber and a better hiker. Our sleep apnea machines have added a few notes to my lower register, and we no longer carp at each other about who snores worst. We’re finding the more vegan meals we eat, the better we feel: There are so many growing things out there to put on your plate.
Style hasn’t changed. I’ve worn plaid shirts and comfy shoes forever. I do now pay more attention to my nose hair and eyebrows than ever before, for the sake of the young. And one always flosses and brushes before singing with a group.
What’s an aging-related adjustment you refuse to make, and why?
On the highest level, I never want to do what Flannery O’Connor called “domesticating despair.” I’ll always talk to younger people as if we’re peers, just like my parents always did. I’ll also continue walking and bussing as much as I can, for as long as I can, to avoid getting too sedentary or cozy with city driving. My wife is a peripatetic school administrator, and a fearless e-biker, riding back and forth across San Francisco in all weather. She’s a role model for me.
What’s your philosophy on celebrating birthdays as an adult? How do you celebrate yours?
I generally don’t—every day is a holiday, right?—but when someone surprises me, that’s a treat. This year some old friends took us out for cocktails at The Top of the Mark, to celebrate the book and my birthday; that was a high time. I usually print out the “Your Year Ahead” horoscope each year and keep a copy. This year I had the pleasure of filling out an Oldster Questionnaire. (Thanks, Sari!)
Oh, magnificent Mark! Good luck with your novel but please write a memoir. I feel like you have so much to share that we can benefit from :)
This was fantastic! I particularly loved this gem, Mark: “There are so many pitfalls you can’t fully see when you’re young...and you’ll never know how dangerous some of those were, and how liberating those wins will feel, until you’re on the other side of the minefield.” So much truth! Really enjoyed reading your words this morning!